Tom Brady Kissing His Son on the Lips Controversy Is Super Bowl Week’s Weirdest Story So Far

Tom Brady of the New England Patriots in Bloomington, Minnesota, February 1. Brady has faced criticism for kissing his son on the lips.Photo: Elsa/Getty

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Tom vs. Time, the documentary series currently screening on Facebook Watch that offers an intimate look at the private life of the New England Patriots quarterback, may have caused more trouble than it was worth.

First there was the saga generated by WEEI radio host Alex Reimer, who described Brady’s five-year-old daughter Vivian as an “annoying little pissant” in a review of the show last Thursday. Reimer’s unedifying choice of words led to an unholy amount of controversy. WEEI has suspended him indefinitely. Kirk Minihane and Gerry Callahan are apparently desperately trying to mend the station’s fractured relationship with Brady, who probably has more important things to think about like, uh, Super Bowl 52 on Sunday.

Now the Reimer episode seems to have died down, Brady apparently has another vaguely farcical controversy on his hands. CBS New York posted an article on January 31 with a clip from ‘Tom vs. Time’ showing Jack, Brady’s 11-year-old son, kissing his father while he receives a massage.

Brady describes the first kiss as a “peck,” so Jack comes back for a second kiss and that’s where things get weird, mostly for CBS.

“Jack returns, leans over again and kisses his father on the mouth a second time. And the second kiss shared by father and son prompted tweets from viewers using words like 'very disturbing' and 'uncomfortably long,'” CBS reported.

The network went out onto the street and asked New Yorkers what they thought of the clip, drawing responses like, “I’m a little uncomfortable with that.”

Had Klaatu, the benevolent alien from The Day the Earth Stood Still, landed in New York in the week before Super Bowl 52, he might have considered a media outlet seeking to generate controversy over a moment of affection between father and son stranger than the moment of affection itself.

“Today, much like Eve eating an apple from the tree of knowledge (can Tom Brady even eat apples?), I have learned something that I cannot unlearn. I have seen something I cannot unsee. And it is Tom Brady kissing his son on the mouth for kind of a long time,” Gabriella Paiella wrote in The Cut on Thursday, in a hyperbolic paragraph that was hopefully parodying the controversy.